Advances in data compression technologies and expansion of networking infrastructures have led to a surge in digital video services such as, for example, video broadcast/multicast service, video streaming service, remote video storage service, video conferencing service, etc. In some situations, a common video stream is provided to multiple devices that support various processing and display capabilities. For example, when multiple gamers play a cloud-based game together, a game server may provide the same video stream to various gaming devices. As another example, when many viewers want to watch a real-time news program at the same time, a news server may provide the same video stream to various viewing devices.
Scalable video coding (SVC) aims to encode a high-quality video bitstream for efficient transmission. A scalable video encoder may divide a raw video bitstream into one or more subset video bitstreams. The scalable video encoder may derive the subset video bitstreams by dropping packets from the raw video bitstream to reduce bandwidth required for transmission. The subset video bitstream may represent a lower spatial resolution (smaller screen), lower temporal resolution (lower frame rate), and/or lower quality video signal compared with the raw video bitstream. When a user's device sends a request for streaming of a particular video to a server, the server may transmit at least one of the subset video bitstreams to the device. Then, the device may receive and combine the subset video bitstreams, to play the video.